Pasture Fun

Bruce started his day by getting the cows home first.  Sometime during the night someone must have gotten tangled in the fence protecting the limestone screenings piles and proceeded to go through the fence.  This pile is intended to be used to build more lane and had to be protected.  Cows love to play on piles like that and if they weren't fenced away from it they would have it spread out 6 inches deep when they were done.  As it is it's 3 truck loads dumped side by side and we wanted to keep it that way.  There was no harm done in them getting out of where they were because they just ended up in another paddock but Bruce got them home so they wouldn't get into any more trouble. While he was feeding he got a call that 2 were out at the other place again.  This time he found a jump wire that carried the electricity in the fence from one section to the other had broken off.  Hopefully that is the answer to the the problems with that group.  This time last spring we had someone chasing our heifers down there.  The group of 20+ were out 6 times in 10 days and as far as 2 miles away.  While Mike thought it was fun, the cattle were terrified of something to the point that we gated them in the barn over night for weeks straight.  They lost a lot of weight during this time since they weren't eating well and running too much.  Later in the season Bruce saw that 2 animals had scaring on the back of their legs from something that had bitten them.  Compared to that problem having a couple out isn't really anything more than an aggravation.  Other than that the farming events were pretty routine.  We are seeing heats and breeding cows already daily.  I washed another section of pipeline so now I have half of it done.  We need to remark it after moving so many animals and now that the cows and their tails are outside it will stay clean longer.  Since we use the vacuum line as our message center we need to update everything so Joe has the information he needs when he helps.  We operate by routine so it isn't as vital for our purposes but we will need to keep it current for our summer help and milk testing next week.

the cows climb and root with their feet and put their heads down  and grind them in the pile. They do this with corn fodder stacks also and make a horrible mess